“Once you innovate a process and quantify its impact on your business, once you find something that works better than what preceded it, once you discovered how to increase the ‘yeses’ from your customers, your employees, your suppliers, and your lenders — at that point, it’s time to orchestrate the whole thing.

Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.

Without Orchestration, nothing could be planned, and nothing anticipated — by you or your customer. If you’re doing everything differently each time you do it, if everyone in your company is doing it by their own discretion, their own choice, rather than creating order, you’re creating chaos.”

Reflections on Business Development

Reflecting back, I now see how a combination of customers obsession + continuous innovation was the key to creating growth in every successful organization I was in.

We pushed innovation and changing the game.

It wasn’t necessarily about innovating in the product, though we did that too. It was about innovating in how we built what we built.

I can also see how organizations that died, didn’t innovate. They did not create new value. They did not adapt to changing needs in the market.

They survived for a period of time mostly from inertia. Their short-term success was based on past value creation and innovation.

While the business could squeeze the same lemons for a while to make lemonade, eventually there was nothing left to squeeze.

At the end of the day, business development is about continuously figuring out the pains, needs, and desired outcomes of customers in a market.

Which effectively translates to, what are people paying for, as payment is an exchange for value.